A word so fitly spoken t.., p.1
A Word so Fitly Spoken: (The Severed Realms), page 1
A WORD SO FITLY SPOKEN
THE SEVERED REALMS
T.A. LAWRENCE
Copyright © 2022 by Taylor Lawrence
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Karri Klawiter.
Created with Vellum
To Mom,
for keeping every stray scrap of paper I ever wrote on as a child
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Epilogue
Free Prequel Novella
About the Author
Also by T.A. Lawrence
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
ASHA
I might have been glad to be ugly, had it not been for Dinah.
All the beautiful human virgins of the land…
That particular excerpt from the herald’s proclamation looped in my frazzled mind as I raced through the crowded streets of Meranthi.
“All the beautiful human virgins…” a pale-faced faerie dressed in royal blue robes whispered to her similarly clad companion as they strode arm in arm down the street.
I pushed past them, not bothering to excuse myself as I forced my way through the throng of buzzing gossipers. I wasn’t exactly moving with the flow of the market traffic. Everyone else had either stayed behind to listen to the rest of the herald’s proclamation, or they were still gathering around him, having just heard the whispers from their neighbors, having just noticed the congregation beginning to form.
Not me. I had heard enough.
A lanky group of faeries, their pale skin stretched over their skulls, bare despite the heat of the day, fed on today’s gossip as they huddled. “Seems our king is lowering his late father’s employment standards. Did you see that herald? Human as they come.”
Of course, the fae would hone in on that nugget of detail, unbothered by the contents of the proclamation itself.
It made sense to me why the king had chosen to use human heralds to announce his decree, even though no human had ever been employed in the service of the palace. He wanted us to suffer, and what better way to shove our Fates in our faces than for the news to come from the mouths of our kinsmen?
I weaved through a group of females standing in line for produce. The vendor, a scaly faerie with beady eyes and a sunken brow, barked at a woman purchasing sunmelons. “Do I look like I’m in the business of charity?” he asked, his oversized nostrils flaring at her.
“Three coppers. That was the cost just yesterday. I apologize. I didn’t know you had raised your prices,” said the woman clad in dirty grey robes that bulged at the belly, forming a bump that betrayed the reason behind her need for extra rations.
“Consider it a sin tax,” the faerie said. The female faerie behind the pregnant woman pushed past her and slid a few coins across the stall table with her spindly, pale fingers.
If I had to bet, I’d say the faerie only paid him three coppers before he handed her a plump melon.
The human woman—the one with a child on the way—gazed up at the vendor with wide eyes, confusion brimming under her sweat beaded brow.
She hadn’t heard the proclamation. She didn’t understand.
But she would understand soon enough.
Despite my empty belly’s disgruntled protest, I slipped a copper into the pocket of her robes as our shoulders brushed.
I shoved myself through a gathering of male faeries, the kind that self-identified as high fae. As if being superior to humans wasn’t enough—they had to belittle their kinsmen too. They looked human except for the pointed tips of their ears and their obnoxiously blemish-free skin. What the high fae were doing in the streets of Meranthi, I didn’t care to ponder. They had probably gotten bored holed up in their mansions with not as much as a dish to scrub to keep them busy, and had resorted to gawking at the less fortunate. How entertaining we were.
Sure enough, I picked up on snippets of the conversation as I passed.
“—still finding it difficult to come up with a title for my thesis. How does, Humans: an analysis of fidelity in a lesser spec—Hey! Watch it!” the fae barked as I shoved him in the arm, a bit harder than was necessary to push past him. A firm grip landed on my shoulder as he whipped me around to face him. His mouth gaped with the beginnings of an angry retort, but his eyes went wide and his full lips curled into a cruel smile at the sight of me.
“What’s with the veil, girl? Trying to hide from us?” he purred.
It was true. I was trying to hide something. Not out of shame, just simply for convenience's sake. While we humans of Meranthi still covered our heads to protect ourselves from our overly generous sun, women hadn’t been required to cover their faces in more than a century.
He tossed my veil aside and cringed. “Oh, well, aren’t you a fortunate young human? You certainly won’t have to worry about being selected. No one will be mistaking you for a beauty, now will they?” he said, warranting a variety of snorts and cackles from his friends. “Tell me, what wicked being did this to you?” He scraped his fingernail over the cavern where my left eye should have been. I fought back a shudder. “I hear beauty is a requirement. But, about this virgin part. We might have to see—AGH!”
He yelped as I seized the opportunity to scrape the sole of my boot down his calf before slipping away into the dense crowd of headscarves. Their furious cries faded as I rounded the street corner and into an alley.
Clay walls barred either side of the alleyway, most of them textured with warped glass windows tinted with home-painted landscapes of foreign lands, where water sawed through the earth and carved a path for itself, dancing over rocks without the need to hide underground from the sun.
Windows. When we made it out of this wretched place, I would make sure our new home had windows.
Pebbled steps descended below the clay apartments, and I skipped down them, pulling up my robes lest I slip, as I had done on more occasions than I would have liked to admit to myself.
That was the thing about having only one eye. Depth perception wasn’t at the top of my skill set.
I didn’t bother with knocking as I pushed open the wooden door at the bottom of the staircase. It creaked in protest, as if to complain that we had been using it for too long. That we should have left this apartment ages ago.
I couldn’t agree more.
Father and Dinah sat on the only two pillows in our little alcove.
Two seats, despite the fact three of us lived here.
Darkness enveloped most of the room as soon as I slammed the creaky door shut behind me—not that there was much of it to hide. Dim light from a dingy lamp illuminated my father’s dark, wrinkled face as he read, its pitiful rays highlighting Dinah’s perfectly shaped teardrop face as she crocheted.
I’d been right to assume Dinah would be home from the market already. She ran our family’s stall, weaving the finest headscarves the poor in Meranthi would ever lay their hands on. It would have been more efficient for Dinah to stay home all day weaving and for me to run the stall, except, while her face drew in customers, mine had a tendency to steer them away. Apparently, I scared my fellow humans, though what the fae’s excuse was, I couldn’t tell. Maybe they thought my ugli
My sister had a tendency of forgetting that we were also poor, a quality as charming as it was annoying.
Then again, I was the one down a copper for the day’s work.
Dinah tilted her head toward me, pulling her tongue back into her mouth; it had been hanging out the side of her lips while she concentrated on her stitching. That perfect, full mouth shaped into a grin as she saw me. Silly girl saw me every day, yet she still acted like every greeting was the first in years. I couldn’t help but adore her for it.
“Asha.” She laughed, her tenor voice echoing through our hovel. “Did you get side-tracked again?” There was no accusation in her tone. Only endearment for my less-than-convenient tendency to fulfill a whole host of tasks while I was out, only to come back empty-handed regarding whatever I was sent out to obtain in the first place.
“We really are going to have to eat at some point,” my father grumbled, though not unkindly. He peered at me from behind his tattered book, the same and only book he had been reading since he purchased it twenty years ago, and frowned.
Unlike Dinah, my father had a niche for detecting when something was very, very wrong.
“What happened?” he asked.
What happened? I didn’t know where to start. The herald’s proclamation had been so lengthy… Where had it begun?
All the beautiful virgins of the land…
That was the only part that had mattered to me. Everything else had simply been news. Predictable. But that was not where the proclamation had begun.
If they were to understand, I needed to start from the beginning.
“The queen is dead.”
Dinah clutched her chest and gasped, but my father’s gaze didn’t falter. He had speculated the union might end poorly. We both had. I could still see Queen Gwenyth perched on the palace balcony, round cheeks, so pale they would have charred in the Naenden sun, had it not been for the lone servant holding a leaf the size of an elephant ear over her head. I’d watched the tiny servant girl’s arms tremble throughout the entire ceremony.
The queen hadn’t seemed to notice.
It had been the coronation the kingdom hadn’t expected ever to occur. Everyone seemed to think King Rajeen Shahryar would rule until the sun sizzled out, until a darkness enveloped Alondria that even our immortal fae king could not escape.
But then the king’s envoy had journeyed to Avelea for a ball. A ball hosted for the purpose of securing a bride for Prince Kiran Shahryar.
Prince Kiran found a bride alright. Just not the one his father had expected.
I wondered what shocked the late king more: Prince Kiran choosing a human bride, or the ambush that ended the late king’s immortal life, leaving the kingdom of Naenden in the hands of his son and human daughter-in-law?
Something told me it was probably the dying part.
Of course, everyone assumed that Prince Kiran had coordinated the attack. After all, what was the point of being the heir to the throne, if one’s father was expected to live forever? The High Council, a committee consisting of the rulers of each Alondrian kingdom, launched an investigation, but they found no evidence of the prince’s involvement.
So Prince Kiran was crowned King Kiran Shahryar of Naenden, and his human wife Gwenyth, the queen.
After his coronation, our new king had opened his mouth to introduce his bride to the crowd, but she had spoken first. She’d strode out to the edge of the balcony, that poor servant girl shadowing her, and had made an announcement.
As a token of his love for her, the king had agreed to build a sanctuary for her childhood pet to play in.
And that the people of Naenden would be blessed with the ability to contribute to the lavish wedding gift through a mandatory ten percent increase in taxes.
She’d commanded the crowd to bow after that.
Needless to say, Queen Gwenyth hadn’t exactly been the mortal voice whispering in the king’s ear that the humans of Naenden had been hoping for.
“I am sorry to hear that,” my father said, and even though his eyes were cold as onyx, I knew he truly meant it. The queen had been one of us. A human, even if she was one of the wealthy ones.
Even if she was a spoiled brat whose favorite pet was allocated more water rations than the entirety of the Meranthi and Talens slums combined.
I supposed we had all felt safer in the keep of a human brat than a fae brat.
“What happened to her?” Dinah asked.
I plopped down on the hard stone floor and exhaled. As short as the herald’s story had been, it was a story nonetheless. My magic rustled inside me, delighted for a new tale to tell. I preferred to stick to the same three, the tried-and-true narratives that still lit flames of adventure in my sister’s beautiful caramel eyes. Nothing too gory. Nothing with a depressing ending. But my magic… Well, it had its own preferences.
“Oh,” Dinah said in quiet realization. “You don’t have to tell us. Not if you don’t want. Not if—”
“No, this is clearly important. You may leave if you don’t wish to see it, Dinah,” our father said. Dinah bit her lip, but she didn’t move.
I gulped, preparing myself for the voice that was about to overpower mine. For my mouth to reveal details my mind didn’t know, details the herald hadn’t shared. A shudder tapped its way up my spine. I didn’t want to know. But my magic had never cared what I wanted.
When I spoke, the voice that rumbled from my throat was not my own, though it was all too familiar. My voice? My voice was as dry as the Sahli desert that surrounded our little oasis of a kingdom. It cracked whenever I found myself on the precipice of a rant. This voice? This voice was as deep and full as the Adreean Sea, as rhythmic as its violet waves and as threatening as its evening tide. I shuddered again.
I watched as the eyes of my family glossed over at the sound, knowing good and well that in a moment’s time, the same expression would wash over me.
Because when I spoke, when it spoke—it wasn’t enough to listen.
It made us watch.
CHAPTER 2
KIRAN
Humans lie.
The thought is bitter on my tongue, tasting of copper and bile and Ophelia’s blood.
I fight back a gag as my vizier strides into my office, his forehead wrinkled with concern, judgment. That look hasn’t cleared his face since I returned from Talens with the fate of my brother’s wife sullying my hands.
All I had wanted was to go to Gwenyth, my wife, my queen. To wrap her delicate body in my arms and clutch her into my chest until the Flame within me quelled, to hear my defense come in the form of her melodic voice.
